The ARM Diaries, Part 2: Understanding the Cortex A12

A couple of weeks ago I began this series on ARM with a discussion of the companyâs unique business model. In covering semiconductor companies weâve come across many that are fabless, but itâs very rare that you come across a successful semiconductor company that doesnât even sell a chip. ARMâs business entirely revolves around licensing IP for its instruction set as well as its own CPU (and now GPU and video) cores.

Before we get into discussions of specific cores, itâs important to talk about ARMâs portfolio as a whole. In the PC space weâre used to focusing on Intelâs latest and greatest microarchitectures, which are then scaled in various ways to hit lower price targets. We might see different core counts, cache sizes, frequencies and maybe even some unfortunate instruction set tweaking but for the most part Intel will deliver a single microarchitecture to cover the vast majority of the market. These days, this microarchitecture is simply known as Core.